If you're looking for a new novel to occupy your summer, or a good part of it, look no further.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, all 566 pages, is surprising and rewarding. It's worth savoring, both its story and its storytelling.

Set mostly in the '70s on a farm in northern Wisconsin, David Wroblewski's debut is about a family that breeds and trains dogs.

But to say it's about dogs is like saying Moby-Dick is about fish or Equus, Peter Shaffer's classic play, is about horses, and leaving it at that.

Edgar is a teenager, but his tragic story deals with grown-up themes: loyalty and betrayal, and the power and limits of words.

Wroblewski, whose parents ran a kennel in Wisconsin, lets the dogs in his novel share in the narration, to a small degree. Sounds hokey, but it works remarkably well.

Edgar himself is a remarkable character, a medical mystery. He can hear but not speak. His mother says: "He doesn't use his voice — the equipment is all there, but when he cries, there's no sound."

Doctors make their guesses, but Edgar's parents "saw proof of normalcy and strangeness and drew their own conclusions. And all infants need the same simple things, pup or child, squalling or mute."

Edgar learns to use sign language, even with dogs. He identifies with Mowgli from Kipling's The Jungle Book, who could communicate with animals.

But this is no fantasy, even if a ghost has a walk-on role.

The plot, which unfolds slowly, is rooted in rich and realistic details. In one of several memorable scenes, Edgar, all of 14, is entrusted by his father to care for a dog about to give birth to a litter.

Edgar's world changes with the arrival of a prodigal uncle and a mysterious stray dog. Both trigger family secrets and the worst kind of sibling rivalry.

You can hear echoes of Hamlet, but readers need not be Shakespearean scholars to appreciate the novel. The overeducated and the self-taught should find it appealing.

It's the kind of novel that my mother, a 10th-grade dropout, would have loved. She didn't read much, but when she got hold of a novel whose characters caught her imagination, she would endlessly talk about them as if they lived next door all their lives.

By the end, that's how I felt about Wroblewski's characters and the Sawtelle dogs:

"They had measured their lives by proximity to that silent, inward creature, a dark-haired, sky-eyed boy who smoothed his hands along their flanks and legs and withers and muzzles, a boy they'd watched since the moment of their birth. … Witness they were, one and all, trained and bred to watch, taught by their broody mothers to use their eyes, taught by the boy himself to wait for a gesture that put meaning into a world where none existed."

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